


My Violence Uncommitted

by Inaccessible Rail (strangetales)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-20
Updated: 2014-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 22:08:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1664219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangetales/pseuds/Inaccessible%20Rail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“On the eve of her 16th year she would lay eyes upon the jeep for the first time. It looked shinier then, minimally scratched, and with no smarmy decals that she would one day be horrified to be associated with; no bottles of mostly-used nail polish stuffed into the glove box, and certainly no burger wrappers shoved hastily beneath the driver’s seat. No, on the verge of Lydia’s 16th birthday, the infamous jeep looked as if it had been driven right out of the lot only a few months earlier, pristine and box-shaped, and totally not Lydia’s type <i>at all</i>.” (Monster Hunter-Stiles & Banshee-Lydia AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Violence Uncommitted

**Author's Note:**

> All comments and criticisms are greatly appreciated! And feel free to follow or chat on [Tumblr](http://starlessness.tumblr.com).

…I felt I stood outside of life, held  
back – but no one was holding me, I was  
waiting, very near the human,  
my violence uncommitted, I was  
saving it. Once I stripped and  
entered the pit I did not want ever to come up out of it.

\- Sharon Olds, “Celibacy at Twenty”

—

Not once, in either of their lives, had they ever been entirely _expected_. There was the occasional changing of the wind, the feeling that burrowed its way deep into the marrow of unsuspecting bones; but there was never any absolute certainty in these things, and sometimes your knee pain is just knee pain.

Lydia would boast that she could smell the foreboding in the air, breath readily released in a nervous sigh. He would always laugh as if she were full of it, but deep down he knew that there was in fact very little that Lydia _did not_ know, she almost knew too much, and he thought that maybe he laughed because if he didn’t there would be a dark, gaping silence where reality had been. You would never know it to look at her, but it was there; it swam within the darks of her eyes, and shouted its cries amidst the thick tangibility of a shared loneliness.

—

**BEFORE**

Lydia measured her life in the time before Stiles, and in the time after. In the 15 or so years before they had met, Lydia’s life had been an infinite dark space, where she had questions and no answers. Where she had parents who cared less for her physical and emotional well-being and more so for who was the “favorite,” a great deal of intelligence but this she could not necessarily rely on for all of her inconvenient human attitudes; for a kiss against scraped knees or a pair of arms upon awaking from frequent nightmares. In these things she was on her own; in the before.

In the before her powers began to manifest before puberty and before horror movies and so with no prior experience the ghastly faces which began to appear in her mirror, the voices that began to hiss in her ears, they were entirely new, loud, and so frightening that the young girl survived on as little sleep as was necessary to keep from Death.

In the before she took solace in material possessions bestowed upon her as if she were a queen, and for fear of having their own heads struck from their shoulders, her parents would place them in supplication at the bare, soil-ridden feet of their lonely daughter who would, in a few short years, only think of them as the “before.”

As soon as Lydia’s beautiful new shoes began to fall apart, sinking into the mud of the forest every night; as soon as all those mirrors had started shattering, shards piercing the soft skin of her hands; as soon as the cost of therapy started to become more trouble than it was worth, the queen was overthrown, and she had only wanted to walk skin-bare anyway – socks had always felt too confining, high-heeled shoes made her feel as if she were a poorly made tower, and only the barest hint of a breeze would make her crumble.

—

**AFTER**

On the eve of her 16th year she would lay eyes upon the jeep for the first time. It looked shinier then, minimally scratched, and with no smarmy decals that she would one day be horrified to be associated with; no bottles of mostly-used nail polish stuffed into the glove box, and certainly no burger wrappers shoved hastily beneath the driver’s seat. No, on the verge of Lydia’s 16th birthday, the infamous jeep looked as if it had been driven right out of the lot only a few months earlier, pristine and box-shaped, and totally not Lydia’s type _at all_.

And neither was the boy inside it, all large head and big eyes, ambling around town like he was uncomfortable in his body; and nervous to the point that she would have to stifle a giggle every time a teacher would come up behind him in class while he scribbled, whatever it was, all along the margins of a thick notebook. A thick notebook with an unusual symbol in the bottom-right corner, like a sigil, meaningfully impressed. She tried to shake it off but every time it crossed her mind it would call to her, like an echo; her name short and perfunctory, like being awoken from a dream.

“ _Lydia._ ”

She was staring at a weed of all things, a small, lavender-colored flower breaching the concrete of the sidewalk by the bike rack at school, frail and not suited to her particular taste. She had been on her way home when she’d taken notice of it; as if the world had suddenly become desaturated, and the pale petals of the nameless weed had become the most vibrant purple she had _ever seen_.

“Lydia Martin?”

Not a dream. Being spoken to, asked a question; should probably answer. His fingers were long like the rest of him, his hair short, making his head look even bigger than it had looked initially, and his eyes were questioning and wide, like a fox caught in the headlights.

“That’s me,” she answered shortly, clutching her books defensively.

“I noticed that you were really good at math and I was wondering…” a bit bumbling and quick, as if he couldn’t be bothered to take a moment and think about what he would say, “if you could help me out?”

She knew there were more words in there somewhere but she had lost them – like so many other words these days, it was hard to tell the difference between the soft whispering she heard _everywhere_ and the normal, every-day speech that everyone else seemed to be using to communicate. She thought of the sigil inscribed on the cover of his notebook. _Lydia._

“Sure,” she answered, “my house, 6:00. Don’t be late.”

—

It was his father’s death that did it, turned the boy she had met at 16 into the man she would come to know at 20; he was no longer “lanky,” but simply tall and well-muscled, so that his shirts wouldn’t drape over him as if they were two sizes two big and he looked as if he had been living in a cupboard under the stairs. His hair grew long, too long, for a while – and she was forced to cut it herself in the dim light of her bathroom. It would be hypnotic, nearly silent but for the snipping of the scissors, and when she exposed the pale skin of his neck she pressed a kiss there, and thought about how _nothing_ was _ever_ entirely expected.

He had suspected what she truly was all along, very nearly from when they had first arrived in Beacon Hills. He had shown her the entry, “banshee,” in an old, leather-bound book, inscribed with the very same symbol that she had seen written on Stiles’ own notebook at school. The original pages were completely filled to bursting with small, neat, _beautiful_ calligraphy, detailing the very things that Lydia had heard, whispering to her from the shadows, but which she had never been able to define and now here they were, laid out in front of her like some sort of supernatural encyclopedia. There were other pages too, slid in between the antiquated, yellowed paper, only these were written in his own sloppy, teenaged hand, and with the occasional, “WHAT THE FUCK???” scribbled in corners.

“Eloquent, Stiles,” she had said, hiding a smile.

—

But they hadn’t come to town for _her_ , she was only an omen made flesh; she wasn’t of any _real_ danger to anyone. She was fascinating to be sure, and Stiles would have preferred to exert all of his energy on understanding just what it was Lydia was capable of, but his father had reminded him, time and again; every time she had closed the front door behind her and could still hear them, not from within the house, but like a vision, as if they were comically floating in the air above her head.

“She’s not why we’re here,” Mr. Stilinski would utter solemnly, and his son’s smile would fade, like clouds passing over the sun.

She had turned out to be a lot more important than Stiles’ dad had assumed, although no one would know until it was too late. Until Lydia was cut down in the middle of the lacrosse field late at night, her dress torn and soaked in blood; until Mr. Stilinksi was lying in the morgue, his throat torn out and Stiles all alone, sitting in a hard and uncomfortable hospital chair, waiting for her to wake up; sobbing into the delicate frame of her ear, grasping her hand so tightly she thought she could see an imprint in her flesh, even years later, the shape of his hand hovering over her own as if she were haunted by a perpetual ghost.

—

Her overly-exuberant ego said it was the haircut (and maybe that _hint_ of a kiss) that had inspired him, put all those delightful “revenge schemes” into his now perfectly cultivated head, made his eyes sparkle and darken all at once; and she couldn’t help but smile in return, a wolfish grin sliding across her features, betraying a mind full of wicked imaginings.

Lydia had already had her fair share of fantasizing with regard to Peter Hale, but she had never been positive she could take care of the _problem_ on her own, and although it was hard to admit it to herself, the idea of being alone in a room with him made her feel physically sick; the voices in the vicinity, building a nest in Lydia’s head would howl and wail in protest. _Not **him**!_ they would cry, the sound of a thousand voices screaming out at once, _Not again!_

She continued to get nightmarish visions long after her connection with him had been severed, even years later, every once in a while, curled up in the back seat of the jeep with Stiles’ arms loosely wrapped around her in sleep. It was an unfortunate side effect of who Peter had been and what she was; a messenger of death, an eternal relationship with the forgotten echoes of the universe and seeing as how Peter Hale was himself an echo – distorted, violent, _cruel_ , she thought she felt him sometimes, trying to worm his way inside her head, just as she had when she was 16.

It was her importance that had gotten Stiles’ father murdered. Father and son would have never found Peter without realizing that Lydia had been their biggest clue, for weeks, disappearing, eyes glassy, as if stricken with sudden on-set cataracts; and they had known: possession; plain and simple, only of the non-spectral variety, and far more dangerous.

—

To simply kill Peter could have been easily executed, but that hadn’t been something that either of them had truly wanted. What satisfaction could be gained from watching him, a lifeless lump of flesh, fall to the ground with a resounding “thud,” a completely anticlimactic death for a truly monstrous villain – so much more than just a mindless beast, killing with no hint of remorse, Peter Hale had perpetrated his villainy without a care in the world, and Stiles and Lydia agreed that his own death should be no different.

If Lydia had been interviewed by some magazine or television show in the aftermath of Peter’s demise, as if it had been some great finale, she would have expressed sincere regret at how sloppy they had been. They had been admirably passionate in their pursuit, and ultimately successful, yes, but with no hint of professionalism, no _forethought_. She isn’t quite sure what strange niche would request an interview with Lydia Martin about a bloody execution, but she had just been so damn _proud_ afterwards – it was hard not to want to stand on a pedestal for a few days.

The voices were unusually silent when he screamed, so close to Death and for so long, yet there was barely a whisper. “I already know,” she spoke softly against the reddened flesh of Stiles’ ear, her hands clutching the tops of his arms, “there’s no need to warn me.”

“I already know.”

—

Beacon Hills was easy to abandon. Lydia’s parents had swiftly become of no consequence, lost in the “before,” that she had slowly come to recognize in the wake of Stiles’ arrival. There had been friends, but they were lost to them both, trapped in pubescent confusion, and there hadn’t been any time to explain; the fire had grown quicker than either of them had expected. They drove off in the early light of a cloud-filled dawn, there was no sunrise to boost their spirits, and neither of them especially _needed_ any boosting, so filled to the brim with satisfaction and the strange, burgeoning feelings of lust, there was barely a hint of melancholy to be found.

A surprise, but not entirely _unexpected_ , and after about a 100-mile stretch of highway they had pulled off along the coast, where the waves beat mercilessly against the rocks, and the rain hummed softly against the frame of what was to be their new home. In the muffled silence she had gracefully crawled across the gearshift, knees dirty and bruised, feet bare, and had settled herself comfortably on his denim-clad lap, her dress fanned out between them.

She was thankful; the voices had been quiet then.

—

Stiles never forgot his father, and Lydia would never have expected him to. But the darkness came easier to her, she had known it all her life – it had been more welcoming than her parents had ever been. There were things in the years that followed that they would have to do, perhaps unpleasant things that would require her steady hand instead of his own, which shook for years closed around the handle of a knife, or the trigger of a crossbow. She never held it against him, yet seldom cursed her own fate. He had his demons and she had hers – hers just seemed to have less of a thing for qualms.

The years following the death of Stiles’ father and Peter Hale would be remembered as some of the greatest of her young life. It was new and frightening, certainly; they had stolen food on more than one occasion, and there had been an incident or two with pilfered wallets and the like, but it had all been in the pursuit of perfection. Stiles liked to think of it as the kind of perfection that saved lives, and Lydia would never deny this, but there was a distinct kind of hedonistic pleasure on her part; in the hunt, the kill, the power that no longer frightened her. It was in the honing of her abilities that they knew where to go next, there was a surprisingly small amount of aimless drifting – there was always _somewhere_ to go, some new monster to slay.

But the drifting was nice sometimes. And as she grew to respect the voices that had gone in and out of her consciousness her entire life, they too respected _her_ , and in the days or weeks of endless road, drive-ins, and the occasional less than grimy motel rooms, there was a particularly meaningful silence in her head, both well-meaning and foreboding; as if to say, “We’re giving you this, but we can just as easily _take it away_.”

—

They were adrift in a sea of summertime fun when she turned 21. And how she laughed at the song Stiles had requested on the radio, booming through the jeep’s speakers, the wind from the open window tangling her salt-encrusted hair. There were dried, muddy footprints on the dash where her feet rested, and she could feel the flaking dirt against the soft skin of her feet. Stiles’ ridiculous sunglasses were perched within the nest of his hair, and she could feel the vibrations of his voice deep within her chest, coursing through the blood that pumped excitedly into the caverns of her heart.

“ _I love you_ ,” she thought, briefly, the words flashing behind her eyes. “ _I love you._ ”

No sooner had she thought the words, had even considered saying them aloud, and the voices began. Soft at first, like the sound of a party behind closed doors, and then all at once, like walking into a crowded airport. There would be no sentimentality on the night of her 21st birthday. They had _both_ gotten plenty drunk in the years since Beacon Hills, so there was no bar calling her now-legal name, no expectant party guests. But there was a frequent howling, growing louder; more than one, humans; the buzzing of insects, like scenes in a film moving swiftly behind her eyes, as quick as a speeding train. Like a bullet.

He kept glancing between her and the road now, but there was no concern in his eyes; there hadn’t been for years, just eagerness and curiosity. Her feet slid from the dash and she watched the crumbling mud fall to the floor of the jeep. They would have to go back. She plucked Stiles’ sunglasses from off the top of his head and put them on in preparation for the mild headache she knew was coming. He shut the radio.

“That bad?”

She smiled and placed a comforting hand on the back of his neck; felt the heat of the day warming his skin before it was lost, cooled in the rapidly fading daylight.

“Nothing we haven’t seen before.”

She felt the darkness calling out to her from within the deepness of the pit, and relished the rising of the moon.

**Author's Note:**

> I know I set this up for a sequel, but I don’t think I’ll be writing one. This took ~~months~~ weeks to complete and I’m not sure if I have it in me to continue. Maybe if there’s enough interest, or I happen to become inspired, but I wouldn’t count on it. Thanks for reading!


End file.
